Category: Uncategorized
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The joy of disastrous love affairs
On Thursday I went to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memorial service and wrote about it here for The Bookseller. Right now, I would like time to stop so that I could reread everything she ever wrote. I’d start with The Cazalet chronicles – I want to submerge myself in the gloriously messy affairs of Polly, Louise…
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What Gatz and Fifty Shades of Grey have in common
Greetings from my holiday in Holland where it is raining relentlessly. I’m used to spending my holidays in Holland in the rain but this year there is the vague consolation that I would be equally as wet and cold in London. As indeed I was on Friday when I went to see Gatz with my…
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Seriously bad love…the only kind that really works
It is a truth not particularly universally acknowledged that simple, plain, uncomplicated and stress free love doesn’t really work in fiction. Almost all romantic fiction stops at the point when the amusing misunderstandings have been cleared up and the happy couple walk off into the distance together to enjoy three years tops of uncritical staring…
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Hopes and Dreams – Debut Fiction in 2012
I’ve been thinking about the turn of the year and about what it is that makes reading debut fiction so appealing and have decided that there is a lot of common ground based on the triumph of hope over experience. In the case of the New Year, the resolutions are unbroken and still hold out…
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Little People v Erotic Despair
I’ve admitted before that I have irrational prejudices which often turn out to be nonsense and I caught myself at it again today. This morning I finished The Land of Decoration, a powerful debut which publishes next March. It is about a ten year old girl called Judith whose Father takes her knocking on doors…
Cathy Rentzenbrink 